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Hiroshima, Mon Amour

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Petunia Winegum on August 6, 2015

Our touchy-feely age is one in which families are encouraged to be ‘open’. The old notion of skeletons in the ancestral closet being kept there has been usurped by the growth of the genealogy industry and the popularity of programmes such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, examining every branch on the family tree with forensic thoroughness. Weep over the fate of the Victorian workhouse inmate who was wrongly accused of theft and hanged at Newgate, not to mention the Georgian rake who abandoned his thirteen children to run a Jamaican sugar plantation before succumbing to syphilis. It’s never been easier to unlock the vault housing the life-stories of distant ancestors who brought such shame upon their descendants that their names were rendered forbidden words in polite company for generations.

I’m quite envious of this openness, to be honest. As a child in the 1970s, most of those family secrets remained unspoken and only came out when my grandparents passed away. Even my own parents kept plenty from me until I was into my twenties, and the sad fact now is that anyone of the pre-war generation who could have answered my questions has gone. Not that they’d be keen to talk, of course; it was drilled into them that certain figures were to permanently remain persona non-gratis, even within the secure confines of the family home. What you’re left with is a box full of tiny sepia photographs, and nobody will ever be able to identify half of the people portrayed on them. Rumours of illegitimate births, adopted siblings and asylum incarceration will never be confirmed nor denied. When it comes to the Official Secrets Act, the government has nothing on families.

My maternal great-grandfather was born in Massachusetts – and that sentence reveals everything I know about him. He died a couple of years before I was born and my mother never inquired as to his background. Nobody knows at what age he came to England, whether his US roots stretched back to the pre-1776 American colonial era or if his family had immigrated to the States during the time of the Irish Potato Famine. The only certainty my own grandfather (his son) ever expressed was that we had a relation of some fame, or perhaps infamy. My mother’s maiden name was Tibbott, and as so often happened before the age of precise documentation, the spelling of surnames on birth certificates could change with each member of an extended family to be registered. This would explain why the surname spelling of the American ‘cousin’ we shared had diverged from my granddad’s own. His was spelt Tibbets, and Colonel Paul Tibbets played a rather significant part in a rather significant event that took place exactly seventy years ago today.

From the viewpoint of the Allies, and certainly the Americans, the need to bring the Second World War to an end was imperative in the summer of 1945. It was over in Europe, but continued to rage in the Pacific, largely due to the ferocious do-or-die mindset of the Japanese, for whom surrender was an unthinkable concept. US forces had taken five weeks to capture the allegedly strategic Japanese island of Iwo Jima at the beginning of 1945, a battle amongst the bloodiest of the entire conflict and one that cost the Americans almost 7,000 lives. The Japanese lost a staggering 22,000, for even though they were vastly outnumbered, they would not give-in as death was preferable to capture. Thousands died via ritual suicide.

The prospect of invading mainland Japan and incurring losses that would far exceed those at Iwo Jima was something that many estimates claim would have prolonged the war for at least another year. US bombing raids over Japan had been regular occurrences since June 1944, and though the targets were nominally industrial, Japan’s industry could almost be called ‘cottage’ in nature, with most factories small facilities situated in urban areas, resulting in inevitable civilian casualties and fatalities. The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo was the most chillingly effective bombing raid of the entire war, with an estimated 80,000-100,000 killed. Despite the horrors unleashed by this bombing campaign, the Japanese remained resolute in their determination to fight to the death and the Allied invasion of Japan, provisionally pencilled-in for October 1945, was hardly an operation guaranteed to bring the conflict to a swift climax.

Salvation came via the Manhattan Project, the Allies’ top-secret development of nuclear weaponry that had undertaken the first-ever detonation of a nuclear device in New Mexico four months after the firebombing of Tokyo. The Potsdam Declaration issued by the US, UK and China in July 1945, the same month of the New Mexico detonation, demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan with a warning of ‘prompt and utter destruction’ should the demand not be adhered to. It wasn’t. With the atom bomb ready and waiting to be used, it now seems inevitable that it would be the last throw of the dice to prevent the autumn invasion of Japan. Perhaps only those involved in the Manhattan Project and President Truman himself were really aware of the devastating damage the bomb could inflict upon its target. The crew selected to fly the plane carrying it over Hiroshima probably had no real idea. How could they? Mankind had never before comprehended any weapon was capable of such overwhelming destruction. When Colonel Tibbets took off in the Enola Gay (named after his mother) at 2:45am on August 6 1945, it took the plane six hours to reach Hiroshima. At 8:15 local time, one era of earth history ended and another began.

Colonel Tibbets was doing a job, obeying orders. It wasn’t the first time he’d dropped a bomb from a plane; his prior experience had an obvious bearing on his selection for the Hiroshima gig. Like Neil Armstrong, Col Tibbets happened to be in the right historic place at the right historic time. What happened in the seconds after the bomb was released from the Enola Gay arguably changed the world more than any great leap forward that had occurred on the other side of August 6 1945, the defining moment that mankind’s incurable desire to impact upon its surroundings had been leading up to for millennia. The image of that immense mushroom cloud rising above Hiroshima and the photos and film of the aftermath have haunted the human race ever since, something that – despite the continuous development of nuclear arsenals in the seventy years following it – have perhaps been responsible for no further employment of The Bomb in warfare after Nagasaki, three days following Hiroshima. We all know the score.

My reaction to discovering I was related to Paul Tibbets was much the same as anybody’s would be upon learning of a connection to someone who was pivotal to a historic event of great significance. A friend of mine once told me ancestors of hers had been drinking buddies of the notorious Edinburgh body-snatchers Burke and Hare; I thought that was quite impressive, but come on – Hiroshima? They don’t come much bigger, nor, it has to be said, sadder.

The Japanese Empire worked on the people at the time on the basis of “State Shinto”, a religion predicated on the literally godlike supremacy of the Emperor and his bloodline. A living God. Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad it seems.

I’ve sometimes ruminated on the parallels between Japan, a small island off the east coast of the Asian continent and Britain, a small island off the west coast of the continent of Europe. Both inveterate Imperialists in their day and both fanatical about tea; and both formerly huge fans of wrestling too. It cannot just be mere coincidence, can it? Something in the water perhaps.

I sometimes wonder if we always pick the wrong allies. Gladstone said something along the lines of Britain and Russia should be natural allies, situated as they are on the two extremes of Europe, often mistrusted by the Central European powers. His theory was that if us and the Ruskies had an alliance it would prevent an over-powerful Germany.

Interestingly, the Japan of the Imperial Cult and State Shinto and all that was a creation of the later 19th century. The Japanese decided that to catch up with Europe, they had to copy Europe. They took the model of a state religion from Christianity- Japan had previously been rather irreligious and thought the religiosity of Europeans rather comical. And they modelled the secular State on Europe too. Unfortunately the model they chose was Prussia.

This is well worth a read, it gives an insight into how much of the stereotypical “traditional” Japan is really so traditional-

Someone earlier (Moor, I think) remarked on the similarities between Britain and Japan. That reinvention of ‘tradition’ reminds me of parallel, albeit a little less harmful, developments here around the same time, particularly in the foundation of druid chapters that posed as ancient orders.

It’s seemed to me for a long time that many conservatives have no grasp of how much of British “tradition” is a Victorian invention, which was a time of enormous social engineering and the first wave of “political correctness”. I think the current Progressive reinvention of Britain (and other countries) is very similar and, basically, a second wave of Victorianism.

As far as I can tell, I have no famous or infamous ancestors. I come form a long line of boring “grey men” and “grey women”. That suits me very well. I once joined an evening class, and at the first meeting we were asked to chat to the person along side for a couple of minutes, after which we took it in turns to tell the others what we had learned about the person next to us. The chap I’d been talking to got up and his opening line was that he’d just met the most boring person he’d ever encountered.

I have had a couple of goes at “tracing” my family tree using the plethora of on-line sites. I never get past my paternal grandparents as all the sites I went to wanted me to register and pay a subscription fee to go further back in time, and I wasn’t really that interested.

I’m always a little sceptical when people start talking about their own family tree. They invariably claim relationships to either someone rather famous or rather infamous, but kudos to you Pet for your famous link.

What you’ve always to remember when tracing family trees is that you will only ever uncover the ‘documented’ version which, in times past, was ‘casual’ to say the least. A full historic DNA analysis of almost any family would produce surprises in most generations, so it puts all the documentation channel, along with its apparent results, into doubt.

There was definitely one President that wasn’t a member of the extended family. I’m guessing Obama, but it could have been one of the others, to be honest. Does somewhat put paid to the myth of the thirteen colonies breaking with the concept of hereditary privilege, though.

So sorry for arriving late to the party. True Obama’s Mum was from Kansas, not a southern state as is reckoned when our Civil War is figured in but rather what we call the Midwest – and “mid” is precisely that as the geographical center of the so-called Lower 48 (that’s excluding Alaska and Hawaii) is located in Kansas.

Mrs Mudplugger’s mother was conceived by a nurse, working far away from her home village, around Christmas 1926, born the next year but without the benefit of a father’s name being listed. Deducing the identity of that ‘Impregnator General’ has thwarted all my efforts to date – a mixture of reported fact and conjecture puts the focus on a married doctor working at the same institution with a forename Joseph, but I’ve so far failed to find a single positive match. That baby is still alive (only just) and we have obtained samples from which DNA could be obtained in the future, just in case the quest ever identifies a positive target. She herself would love to know the identity of her father but time is fast running out to achieve that.

In the process of the investigation of that large, working-class family, I uncovered documentary details of huge numbers of marriages and births from the last 150 years and it was surprising to see the frequency of ‘hurried’ marriages with births following ‘too soon’ after, in addition to the very young ages involved. Bearing in mind that puberty occurred much later then (around 16/17), the frequency of rushed marriages at that age suggest that the working-class early-teens of the allegedly up-tight Victorian Age were even more sexually active than current ones, but without any technology to prevent the output. Indeed it is quite likely that some/many of those marriages were arranged as cover-ups, with a groom perhaps unknowingly taking the hit for an earlier impregnation by another. What price the Birth Certificate data in your family tree ? It seems probable that, in the quite near future, readily available DNA testing will render familial documentation obsolete, with all manner of consequences for inheritance etc.

I mention further down the page that Aged Mother Dwarf was quite well known in genealogistical circles. One of the bits of wisdom about her chosen topic of specialist knowledge that she imparted to me was that often, very often even, ‘boring’ families are boring for a reason. They are boring because, at some time in their history, an ancestor will have chosen to become boring or ‘normal’. The sins of the father and all that.

Let me give you an example; in Germany it is almost impossible to change one’s surname. It can be done but you have to have a damn good reason -like being born a ‘toiletsitter’ (a old Jewish surname, I kid you not) . There is one major exception to that almost mosaic law…and why you don’t meet many ‘Hitlers’ or ‘Goebbels’.

In my own family, the stain of bastardry meant a certain Granddad Dwarf grew up a humble EastEnd Pawnbroker .

Hitler’s brother apparently had moved to Liverpool in the 1930’s and settled down there. he appears to have continued to live quietly through the next decades although I haven’t pursued the story much further. Just as well those clever German scientists hadn’t got round to inventing Twitter as part of the war effort.

Ah, yes – I seem to remember seeing something about Hitler’s ‘Scouse’ sibling on TV years ago. Maybe he changed his surname to Hilter in order to avoid confusion. It worked on that Python sketch, after all…

“Patrick Hitler visited his father in Germany when he was 18 and was introduced to his ‘Uncle Adolf,’ who was by that point on his rise to power. Patrick returned to England, and in 1939 he and Bridget, fearful over their connection, emigrated to the U.S. where they settled on Long Island and changed their last name to Stuart-Huston.”

where he was sent to fight in the First World War before embarking on his infamous rise to political power.

Pretty sure the dear old DM is wrong on that score- yes I know, how could the Daily Hitler get any part of it’s idol’s biography wrong? It beggars belief.

Anyways, if I recall aright, AH actually petitioned the King of Bavaria to be allowed to join the Bavarian (ie German) Army because at the time he was still an Austrian. Rather puts paid to the ‘Hitler was a coward’ myth.

As far as his WWI record is concerned, Hitler seems to have been no coward.

A lot of modern Germans like to believe that AH was a cowardly misfit who sulked behind the front lines and only got his Iron Cross in passing…but then again a lot of modern Germans like to believe that he, AH, later SEIZED power (the fact that Großvater & Großmutter democraticallyvoted AH in is one of those things you never mention at the dinner table).

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were collateral damage in the same way as those in London, Coventry and Dresden, simply the sad and inevitable price of mid-20th century ‘general public’ warfare. The debate about whether it was necessary to end the war more quickly or less mortally will remain unresolved, as will that about whether it was really a live warning demonstration to our Russian ‘allies’ to keep their post-war ambitions in check. The fact that nuclear weapons have not been used again for at least 70 years, despite being held by many troubled nations, may be the most lasting monument to those many thousands of innocent Japanese lost in those two devastated cities.

After WWI the military authorities perhaps realised that if they allowed too many soldiers to die as had happened in that debacle, then there was a long-term risk of mutiny and the destabilisation of the military contract – perhaps even with the proles refusing to fight at all. Civilians however were outside the system so to let loose the dogs on them instead left the warriors intact but the importance of their war still represented by the vast numbers of casualties. Watching Iraq on the telly, you were left with the definite impression that the safest place to be was in one of those terminator outfits.

No one famous in mine. A long list of farm labourers who occasionally managed to borrow enough to become a tenant. I did find it affecting to discover a great great grandmother who died in childbirth from a condition I inherited from her. She was only 20 and it was a ‘shotgun wedding’. She has no named grave and the infant who miraculously survived was brought up by her parents. Single dads worked too long in the fields to look after a baby. In less than two generations her name had been forgotten, a young lost life reduced to the rumour I was asked to look into by her great grandson, my father. I think that’s a more typical story for most families than finding a famous name.

My great-grandfather – and policeman and ex-Guards regiment soldier – got my great-grandmother up the duff, and then did a runner to Australia before the baby was born, having managed to avoid any sort of marriage in the process. A couple of years later, still a reservist, he was called back to the colours, managed to last from early 1915 to late 1918 on the Western Front – earning a Military Medal in the process – before copping a Blighty One. He chose to head back to the family home in Ireland, contracted Spanish Influenza on the way, and died there. For year all my side of the family had was a name, a faded photograph, and a vague geographical point of origin, until I tracked the old bugger down via police and army records. The members of the family still living in the family were surprisingly welcoming, once we made it clear that we hadn’t come to stake a claim on what was left of the family farm.

Aged Mother Dwarf, having been a genealogist of some renown, knows such things like one of my Norfolk ancestors was transported to OZ for the crime of stealing a lamb-which he had tried to hide under his Grandmother’s chair- look, i said he was from Norfolk, ok?

I half remember , hell a quarter remember, back when i was very young, a conversion late one night between Aged Mother Dwarf and Great Grandmaman Dwarf…something to do with some part of the Norfolk family marrying off a daughter many many years ago and her newly baked husband discovering on their wedding night that his virginal bride was better endowed under her wedding dress than he might have imagined…two for the price of one so to speak. ….do I need to remind you that I said Norfolk,?

Several years ago my wife and I visited my sister and her husband in Australia. To celebrate our visit, she arranged a dinner party with 5 other couples, all native born Australians. During the table conversation, all of the guests proudly claimed that they were descended from original European convicts. Without saying so, I did wonder the odds of that, 5 descendants of convicts meeting, and marrying, 5 other descendants of convicts in a country 30 times the size of the UK.. In the 3 months we spent in Oz, we never met anyone who admitted being descended from the troopers sent out to guard the convicts.

I wonder how many of today’s sanctimonious witch hunters would be shocked to find that they are the progeny of a long line of people who today they would be hunting down as paedophiles? And mainly legally, to boot? Nor, and please note that this term is used in a non gender specific manner – can they all be SOBs, can they?

One of my ggggrandfathers was an Enrolled Pensioner Guard on a convict ship in 1850. As a result of family history research I have discovered lots of hitherto unknown Aussie cousens. None of them seem bothered by their ancestor’s history.

My father, who was in at the start, in the BEF during the ‘Phoney War’, evacuated from Dunkirk, and whose WWII in Burma didn’t end until after 2nd Sept 1945, concurs that those atom bombs saved hundreds of thousands of allied service-peoples’ lives.

The Peace Museum in Hiroshima is well worth the visit. The enormity of what happened is well portrayed. It’s a good lesson as to why use of such weapons should be resisted at all cost, both now, and in the future

But if you have any historical knowledge, understanding of the maelstrom that accompanied war in the past non technical, non instant news era, and any common sense whatsoever, when you get back outside, while you may certainly mourn for the tens or hundreds of thousands that died, if you just pause long enough to look around you, you’ll readily give thanks for the millions who, without it, lived but otherwise wouldn’t have, and rejoice for the tens of millions, yet to come, who would never be

Joe Public must be a similar age to me. Having just finished walking from Normandy to the Ruhr, having manned AA guns in the Blitz, my father was being trained to attack Japan when the bombs were dropped. The war ended PDQ afterwards, and forget the big bombing raids, the Japanese could see that if this destruction could be wreaked by a single aircraft, then they were well and truly doomed. Actually, the Hiroshima bomb was a blind alley, technically, and the modern age really belongs to the Nagasaki bomb. Nevertheless, just simply ignore the revisionism. If the war had been finished with an invasion of the Japanese islands, the death toll would have been collossal, and the surviving Japanese would have had a worse time.

It’s like the revisionist attitude to Dresden. Big raids were needed to keep the German High Command convinced that they couldn’t spare the Luftwaffe from air defence, nor all those antiaircraft guns that could have doubled as anti tank guns (theirs could, ours couldn’t) – and, plenty of people were killed after the Dresden raid. Oddly enough, at this time of the war, the Germans were about to complete their attack on London with cruise missiles (V1) and were truly in the swing of attacking with unstoppable ballistic missiles (V2), the numbers of each fired giving the lie to the idea that Germany was finished then. Perhaps Dresden as much as anything stopped the Germans from still being fighting come August.

The same thing applies to the Japanese. The writing was on the wall, but they weren’t finished. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (there weren’t any more bombs ready until the end of the month) really saved them from worse. Opus (as follows) is simply an idiot. Voting for Corbyn, are you, Opus?

If you’d seen a test firing (or understood the physics AND chemistry, or served with them), you would have no doubts of the existence of these things. Both H & N bombs were detonated at an altitude to do the most destruction because they weren’t all that powerful. This also meant that the radioactive fallout was minimal – from the bomb itself, and not from ground dirt made radioactive.

I am sorry to tell Petunia that some people (that includes me) have some considerable doubts as to the existence of the atom bomb or its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I am on the fence as it happens). Whether my doubts are well or ill-founded (and I am not today going into the reasoning) it is – I am afraid to say – not in any event historically accurate to suggest that the dropping of the atom bomb (if it was) led to the Japanese surrender. Again I will not go into what caused Japanese surrender because I am not looking for a pointless argument. I realise my doubts as to the bomb or the true reasons for surrender will upset everyone (Japanese or Occidental) for like everyone else that is what they told me as a child – it is part of our modern set of myths/beliefs. It’s not, however, true.

Petunia, the movie from which your title springs is a strange and chilling one. I’d forgotten all about it over the years but I remember finding it very, very disturbing — with a mix of modern day sexual romance and flashbacks to particularly dramatic after-the-bomb footage.

You noted that “The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo was the most chillingly effective bombing raid of the entire war, with an estimated 80,000-100,000 killed.” and it raised a question for me: Do you have any idea, for comparison’s sake, of the maximum estimated number of Londoners killed in any individual raid or throughout the campaign of the London Blitz?

Somewhere between 40 and 45 000 deaths, perhaps treble that in injuries. Not a large total compared to the complete wipe outs of other cities, nor particularly exceptional given the number of days bombing, plus the attacks with V1 and V2 missiles. The maximum number of consecutive nights bombing of London was 57, with raids on 71 nights.

Do you have any idea, for comparison’s sake, of the maximum estimated number of Londoners killed in any individual raid or throughout the campaign of the London Blitz?

“In comparison to the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, the Blitz resulted in relatively few casualties; the British bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 alone inflicted some 42,000 civilian deaths, about the same as the entire Blitz.” (wiki so take with care)

Mind you, I always get a little annoyed with the “They STARTED it” brigade who, as soon as Dresden, is mentioned squeak “B-b-but what about Coventry !!!” . The death for Dresden being anywhere between 20,000-‘and you pays your money and makes your choice’ , the death toll for Coventry being around 600…which in ‘Blitz’ terms is about the ‘three men and a dog’ level of fatalities.

Never quite sure why some people take such inordinate pride in the fact that the RAF/USAF was better at blowing up civilians than the Luftwaffe.

Pointless arguing about the morals of any of these attacks, area bombing or nuclear. We simply don’t have the perspective. For myself I can’t ignore the activities of the Japanese military wherever they roamed uninvited, China, Pacific, whatever, nor the commitment of Germany to advanced weapons and so called ‘total war’, including extermination. And I don’t accept the revisionists claims about how the aggressors were provoked or left no alternative but war. As a war baby I’m undoubtedly influenced by the attitudes of my childhood. Even considering our now greater knowledge of the technology then in use I still don’t see how there was much alternative to what happened. I’m also unconvinced that the appetite for more has been lost.

Outside of the special case of the industrial annihilation of the Jews, my childhood memories of “war atrocity” was that the Japanese Army was leagues ahead in the atrocity stakes. The German Wermacht (outside of the SS) were generally presented as pretty civilised. Rommel was almost as much of an icon of military honour as Montgomery himself. Fifties British war films are generally pretty even-handed about the war, with cartoonishly strutting nazis only becoming the presentational norm during the 1970’s. I would guess that Merry Xmas Mr. Lawrence was an attempt to ty and assist us to grasp the Nippon mindset.

My ‘Desert Rat’ dad would confirm that view of Rommel – a respected adversary as much as feared for what he could achieve. Same was true of the individual German soldiers, who were generally recognised as reluctantly conscripted working-blokes, just as most of ours were, and mutually respected as such. Didn’t stop them doing everything they could to kill each other, but that’s the dehumanising effect of war.

Moor, I think that you are probably right about the immediately post-War British films and their more mature attitude towards the German. Powell and Pressburger films, Frieda, The One That Got Away and many others refused to indulge in cardboard Nazis. I suspect that American films began the large scale process of caricature. A step change also happened when the first generation which were too young to have any direct experience of war started to become the filmmakers in the 1960s and 70s. It was also at the tail end of the studio contract system during which most of the writers, directors and producers had been at least 40 and often much older. By the end of the 1960s, directors in their mid twenties were commonplace. Their experience of the war – and much of life in general – was not personal – it was largely derived from films, TV and comic books.

I have a children’s encyclopaedia published in 1942 and there is a whole section devoted to Germany and the evolution of modern Germany from the Holy Roman Empire and at one point it refers to the terrible temporary aberration of the Herr Hitler and the Nazi regime…. Even as the bombs fell the children were being reasoned to. Unimaginably small print and absence of pretty pictures in the book too.

I think that the airmen of all of the combatants, in all theatres, are worthy of great respect.

Something often overlooked is how young they were. When you sit back and look at, for example, what the likes of Gibson, Martin, Shannon and the rest of the 617 crews did in preparing for the Dams raid, with Gibson himself running the show at a mere 24 years of age, well, it tends to make the likes of many of Sugar’s apprentice spivs look like a bunch of wimps.

And those ghosts now gathering under the Sakura at the Yasukuni were brave boys too

My blood boils when on occasion local young men (?) in their teens whine on about how hard done by they are because they don’t have a skateboard park, or this or that leisure facility. Meanwhile expecting the state to support & house the consequences of their casual impregnations. Yeah, I know they’re not all like that, but wetness seems to be being bred for. I can’t forget that my dad’s generation at 18 or so were either serving or sent down the pits. Must watch an episode of Bluestone 42 to get my perspective back.

The most revealing book I have read about the Hiroshima bomb is Shockwave by Stephen Walker. It contains details I have not seen mentioned in any other publication. Strongly recommended, superbly researched.